Day 111: The Eleventy Hundredth Day

Crushed. Rondoon was crushed.

Artists, sculptors, carvers, and even a pair of shipwrights worked the ice into a crystalline roundhall for months. First heating snow to boiling and capturing the steam to purify the water. Then carrying the water in skins and pouches near their body to keep them warm on the trip to the site–you couldn’t have the heating fire anywhere near the roundhall. Finally trickling out thin streams of water when and where the Icemaster desired only to walk the cold quarter mile back to get a few drops more.

In the bright nearly all day ring-around-the-horizon sun the ice columns glittered and shone with a brilliance and rhythm that nearly conjured a sprinkling tune to the ear. Like the glass bells of Hoonadaring, but with a more mellifluous tone or a well hammered dulcimer.

But now it was crushed. The beauty, the brightness, the imagined melody all crushed.

Those that still lived struggled to separate the feelings of loss for their compatriots from the feeling of devastation for the loss of Rondoon.